Introduction

If you are interested in computer text to speech (TTS) and speech recognition (SR), this little article is for you. In order to make the PC capable of speech and speech recognition, we need to install the Microsoft Server Speech Platform 10.2, its SDK and the Runtime Languages for TTS and SR you wish. Here are the links:

NOTE: The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 is required to run the Microsoft Speech Platform. Starting from version 10.2 of the latter, the minimum OS required is Windows Vista. If you still have Windows XP, you can try to download an older version, may be 10.1.

After that, we need to create a Windows Form application and add the following reference to the project:

Conclusion

Computer speech and speech recognition are interesting subjects. Nowadays, we can start interacting with the PC using voice. I remember the telefilms Start Trek and Knight Rider. There they could talk with the computer using the voice. These days, they are getting closer, but they are still far away. By the way, if the computer voice doesn't work well, ask Mr. Spock to fix it :-)

Salve! I'm trying to get this, and don't know C# too well. Now, I have the speech sdk version 11 32bit installed, and have Windows 7 64 bit and VS 2010 and .net 4.0. Now, when I try to build the solution, I get a com exception:

"Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {D941651C-44E6-4C17-BADF-C36826FC3424} failed due to the following error: 80040154."

I think it is because you have installed the 32 bit version of the speech sdk and not the 64 bit version. In the OS with 64 bit this sample will run in 64 bit mode. You can NOT use a 32 bit COM object in a 64 bit program (unless you use a wrapper). To workaround this problem you have to compile the sample project only for x86, so it will run 32 bit in the Windows 7 64 bit and you will call the 32 bit COM succesfully.

I agree with you. Sorry, but I don't have spare time and in very little time I did this little program that works fine, so everybody can easly test the TTS and SR directly and have their own opinion. Mine is that it is not bad at all. I also included in the .zip file the MicrosoftSpeechSDK.chm help file, so you can look into the subject deeply.